[113438] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Fiber cut in SF area
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Marquis)
Sat Apr 11 23:11:10 2009
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:08:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <mailman.2283.1239498129.8604.nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Jorge Amodio wrote:
> s/DARPA/ARPA/; s/BBM/BBN/; s/Internet/ARPAnet/.
/DARPA/ARPA/ may be splitting hairs. According to
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_roberts.htm
"DARPA head Charlie Hertzfeld promised IPTO Director Bob Taylor a million
dollars to build a distributed communications network".
And apologies WRT /BBM/BBN/. Guess it was really has been a while now
(given the 4 and 5 figure checks to BBN I signed back in the day).
Sean Donelan wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Apr 2009, Roger Marquis wrote:
>> The real problem is route redundancy. This is what the original contract
>> from DARPA to BBM, to create the Internet, was about! "The net" was
>> created to enable communications bttn point A and point B in this exact
>> scenario.
>
> Uh, not exactly. There was diversity in this case, but there was also
> N+1 breaks. Outside of a few counties in the Bay Area, the rest of the
> country's telecommunication system was unaffected. So in that sense the
> system worked as designed.
>
> Read the original DARPA papers, they were not about making sure grandma
> could still make a phone call.
Apparently even some network operators don't yet grasp the significance of
this event.
> Why didn't the "man in the street" pharmacy have its own backup plans?
I assume they, as most of us, believed the government was taking care of
the country's critical infrastructure. Interesting how well this
illustrates the growing importance of the Internet vis-a-vis other
communications channels.
Roger Marquis
